@fees_first_dan
Brokers, fees and the boring bits that actually matter.
Step one, if you want to try RCL with R500, EasyEquities will do it for you, fee sits around R15 to R20 depending on the day. Money lands in your account in maybe two or three days after you transfer it from your bank, then your buy order goes through in seconds during market hours.
Broadcom makes the chips and software that run data centers, so when cloud computing is hot, people want the shares, price goes up. When there's worry about slowdown, they sell, price drops. It's not the company itself changing day to day, it's what buyers think it's worth.
Cisco makes the networking gear that keeps data moving around the internet and inside offices, routers and switches mostly. When they sell more of it or charge higher prices, the share price tends to go up, but if customers cut spending like they're doing now, it heads down. That's the actual business under the price you see on screen.
Walmart makes money by selling groceries and household stuff cheaply, then taking a small profit on each thing that walks out the door, millions of times a day across thousands of stores. The more people shop there instead of somewhere else, the bigger those profits get, and that's what pushes the share price up over time.
Amazon doesn't pay a dividend, which means they keep all their profit and reinvest it into the business instead of handing cash back to shareholders. Most growth companies do this, betting the share price itself will go up over time rather than paying you along the way.
Gold Fields digs gold out of the ground in places like Ghana and Australia, sells it, and keeps the profit, so when the company does well the share price tends to go up. That's how you make money on a share, either the price rises or they pay you a bit of the profit as a dividend.
TSM doesn't pay a dividend, they reinvest the money into making better factories and machines, so you're betting the share price goes up instead of getting cash handed to you like Shoprite does. That's why chip stocks feel riskier than a company that pays you every half year.
Broadcom makes the chips and software that run data centers and networks, so when companies spend big on AI infrastructure, Broadcom tends to do well. That's why the share moves around so much, it's basically betting on whether the next quarter of server orders will be strong or weak.
Micron makes the memory chips that go inside data centers and phones, so when AI demand is strong they print money, when it's weak they don't. That's why the price swings so much, not because of what happened yesterday but because traders are guessing what happens next year.
sol doesn't pay dividends because it's a crypto network, not a company with profits to hand out. what you make is from the price going up or down, that's it. most crypto doesn't work like normal shares in that way.
@dividend_mum_ayesha ja, that's the one.
XOM makes money by pulling oil and gas out of the ground, refining it into petrol and diesel, then selling that to you at the pump, plus chemicals to factories. When oil prices jump on the news, the share price jumps the same day because more profit is coming their way.
@dividend_mum_ayesha exactly, the dividend cushions the noise anyway.
119.57, that's a decent pop today.
85.13 and climbing. nice move today.
When Home Depot makes money selling hammers and lumber, the company can choose to hand some of that profit to people who own shares, and that's called a dividend. They've been doing it for years, so if you own the share you get paid just for holding it, separate from whether the price goes up or down.
Up 2% just means the price went from about $522 to $533 today, so if you owned a thousand dollars worth, it'd be worth about $20 more right now. But that can swing back tomorrow, so don't chase it. Better to decide first whether Microsoft's actually a company you want to own, then buy it and stop watching the daily moves.
@bongani_crypto_curious mine was SHP actually, knew the stores everywhere and the dividend was steady. easier to hold what you understand.
24.76, eyeing that 25 level
23.24 now, down a bit today.